“In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete! You make me seem—to myself even—what I’m not; what I can never be. I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least enlighten others.”
The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip myself down to the last lie—only there’d always be another one left under it!—and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”
Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor woman,” he heard her sigh.
“Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all? You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”
He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve been magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t wipe out the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does HER no good!”
She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.
“What thought?”
“That it does her no good—all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering. Can it be that it makes no difference?”
He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.
“Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of communication.
It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
“Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down the heathen temples—the temples of the unclean gods—purified them by turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that with one’s actions—the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall against them….” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put good spirits in the house of evil—the spirits of mercy and shame and understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in such great need….”
She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds—they quickened the seeds of understanding.
At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come to live in the house of evil that I built —but you’re there and that’s enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you—it’s through her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?—that makes it hardest—makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have borne it better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from her—everything—even to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted in—the only thing I could have left her!—I took everything from her, I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her—and she’s given me YOU in return!”
His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given ME to you—it is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes hung on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman—that’s the gift she would have wished to give!”
“Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give her?”
“The happiness of giving,” she said.
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